Mrs. Cross sat with her legs sagged down and her head thrown against the back of her chair. Her left hand hung over the armrest, providing easy access to the golden ring on her fourth finger. Rose inched closer and, after taking a deep breath to steady herself, began to pull at it.
It didn't want to move at first — Mrs. Cross had put on a few pounds since her late husband had proposed, and it was stuck behind a roll of fat — but after some twisting and pushing back and forth, it came off. She immediately pocketed it and, after tiptoeing back to the kitchen to retrieve the rest of the ingredients, went upstairs, closing all the doors on the way.
From then, everything went surprisingly well, to a point. Rose opened the window to air the smell of burned herbs, dripped a wax circle on the floor, aligned everything else around it the way the killer had described, and sat down in the center of the circle, a small lead weight in one hand, Mrs. Cross' wedding ring in the other.
She cleared her mind.
It was stunning how fast it worked. She hadn't dwelled much on what to expect in terms of sensation. Accomplishing her goal had been far more important, and she believed the killer would have mentioned it if the process were accompanied by excruciating pain. However, what she did not expect was the immediacy of it.
One moment she was sitting in the attic, shivering with cold, the next she was . . . somewhere.
Rose looked around, although there wasn't much to see. Void, mostly. Shapeless colors in movement. Wherever she was, it didn't seem like the killer was around, so she didn't know what to make of it. Was he awake, perhaps, or not dreaming? Or was he dreaming, but with someone else —the stab of jealousy the thought brought with it was hot and fierce —, and she couldn’t reach him because he didn't want her interrupting?
Or, she thought, resisting the urge to slap herself, perhaps she had skipped one crucial step.
He'd spoken about paths. About choosing them and stepping on them. That had to be what was missing, why she was failing to reach him. He could get inside her dreams because she'd looked in his eyes, and he'd seen hers. She guessed that without that, what she'd just done was useless, aimless. A vehicle headed to nowhere.
Regretting that she hadn't remembered to ask what a path was supposed to look like, Rose filled her head with thoughts of him, on the off chance that it would yield some result. She thought about his face, his mouth kissing her everywhere, his hands manipulating her until she cried to be taken, him bringing her closer and closer to release. She thought about his eyes, since they seemed to be such a key element of the whole business, about how she'd felt looking at them, about the strange, out-of-body experience she'd gone through when she'd done it for too long, about that eerie room filled with so many jars . . .
''What are you doing?"
Rose turned, a gleeful smile on her lips. It died once she saw his face. She'd never seen him look anything other than composed, even when he was emptying himself inside her, but now there was something . . . wild about him. Something ferocious and unchecked. He was wearing nothing but pants, but even so he managed to look disheveled, and his upper lip was curled, baring teeth.
The most unsettling thing, however, was his eyes. He didn't have any. In hindsight, that wasn’t as unexpected as it should be, seeing as he’d flat out told her that they’d been torn out however many years ago. Now that he’d dropped whatever glamour he usually put on to fool her into thinking that of course he had to have them, she could see how in their place he had holes and emptiness, all the way through, and darkness at the bottom. And the darkness saw.
She thought about fainting, but then she thought better of it. They had things to discuss and little time to waste.
"You said that you would leave me alone until I wished to have you back," she told him, fighting the shake in her voice. She gestured around, at the void that was quickly becoming scenery. "This is my way of wishing."
His mouth opened and closed a few times.
"But that is not possible!"
"You explained the method. How to reach into dreams," she insisted, feeling defensive now. "All I did was follow your instructions."
"I told you to try it as a jest." He was looking at her differently now. Like she was something precious but strange, like a double-rainbow. The enchantment he had inflicted on his face must be working properly again, otherwise she wouldn't be able to tell. "You had to have seen my path to reach me.”
“All I did was think about you.” Her conviction was starting to falter. “Are you not . . . happy to see me?”
His features softened, all at once, instantly reassuring her. He walked around the table that was now between them and sat down, heavily. They were downstairs in the bakery, or a dream version of it that could only be told apart from the real thing by the lack of snoring older women. A tiny bit of Rose swelled with pride. This setting was hers, and she’d gotten everything right, even if it felt bizarre to see him make himself comfortable in such familiar surroundings.
“I am. I intended to visit you again in a week or so, to ask if you’d changed your mind. I had not expected, could not have expected, that you would try and succeed in reaching me on your own.” This time he said it with a smile, though it was a somewhat shaken one, and Rose was briefly heartened that he hadn’t planned to abandon her. Unfortunately, he spoiled her goodwill in the next sentence. “Are you a witch?”
“No!”
She must have sounded truly affronted, because he raised a placating hand.
“You called me a demon before. Let’s consider us even.” Even though she was still bristling at his insinuation, Rose had to admit that was fair. “I ask because, if this is not a fluke, if it truly is a power that you have . . . then I just might know a solution to the problem you are facing.”
“Which one?”
“The death one.” He somehow succeeded in grinning and grimacing at the same time. “Do you have many more that are as serious?”
Rose didn’t answer at once. She was still reeling from what he’d just said. A solution. There was — perhaps, he’d said ‘might’, and ‘might’ wasn’t the firmest of guarantees — a solution for death. She’d come for him so that he could take her mind off what would happen, and now he was offering her a way to avoid it altogether, and her heart had never felt more like it was about to burst and fill her ribcage with splinters.
“I can be saved?”
His expression darkened. Slowly, he shook his head.
“Saved is not the best word for it. You could, however, live on after your allotted time expires.”
“How?”
He stood up and offered her a hand.
“I’ll show you.”
They walked outside, hand in hand. The air was warm and summery, the street empty of everything, be it people or animals or snow. He guided her around the bakery, into the alley where they’d first met. Rose stopped when she saw the body and turned to him, a question in her eyes. He put his arms around her, kissed her earlobe with studied softness, and urged her forward.
She didn’t want to look. Then again, it was nothing that she hadn’t seen before.
It was the butcher’s son, again. He was dead, but the blood had yet to stop running out of him, and it was a ghastly sight, although not as bad as the one she’d witnessed in reality. His eyes had already been taken, the empty sockets turned into small pools of blood, but he still had the rest of his face on. The killer stared down, dispassionately, and kneeled beside the body.
Then he took out a knife.
“What are you doing?” Rose stammered.
“I told you what function the eye-reaping serves,” he declared, sounding oddly detached. He made a cut in the side of the butcher’s son’s face, and she badly wanted to look away, but something was compelling her to watch. The reminder that it wasn’t real didn’t help her feel better, as the only reason why it wasn’t was that it had happened already. “This is the function that the disfigurement serves: it frees the lifespans from their former owners
and makes them usable. It also ensures that the dead do not return to leech them.”
Rose didn’t quite agree with him on who the true leech was, but wisely kept her mouth shut.
“If the face is kept intact,” he continued, straightening without having made a single cut more, and put a hand on her shoulder to keep her in place, “then this is often the result. Observe.”
The body shook and broke into seizures. They went on for a long time, long enough for Rose to snap out of her shock, until they stopped abruptly. She glanced at the killer. His expectant, guarded façade made her sure that whatever he intended to show her was far from over.
Sure enough, a moment later the body began to rise. It did so with difficulty, its motions jerky and lurching, like a badly animated marionette. The face the killer had spared this time around held no emotion. It didn’t seem aware of them, or to know or mind where it would go.
They watched it stagger away.
“Lord have mercy!” Rose muttered, speaking indistinctly through the hand in front of her mouth.
“Now, I say often,” the killer began, and she could not believe how he was still talking, and so calmly to boot, “but some of my more experiment-inclined brothers have reported that under certain circumstances, a face can be left intact, and a body can rise and not turn out the way you just saw. They posit that the thing that renders the dead so lost is their inability to find back the path that leads to themselves, which isn’t unusual. Our ability to do so was what set my people apart, in the olden days. Therefore, if I were to have someone like you, someone who can find paths, to others even, and were to leave the face whole . . .”
“I would not become like him?” she asked, gesturing in the direction the body had just left.
“You would be like me. I wouldn’t use what remains of your lifespan, meaning that you would still have only one year left . . . but being as I am, it would be the simplest thing to add more to it.”
“By killing,” Rose said, flatly stating the truth he’d been dancing around. She felt a little sick. She’d been so hopeful, when he’d said there was a way to not die, and he hadn’t lied, but the solution he was offering . . . if she accepted, she’d be an abomination, living on stolen time. Would not dying young be worth that? “I can’t imagine how you want me to respond to this.”
“Commending me for finding such a perfect solution to your dilemma would be the polite thing.”
“Perfect?” she croaked. There hadn’t been a hint of irony attached to the word. She squinted at him, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking. It was astonishingly easy, as he was wearing the same expression he had on when she’d forbidden him from laying a hand on her: eager, and doing a poor job of disguising it. “Is this . . . you are looking forward to this, are you not? To hear me say yes, to have me turned into the same thing you are! You would enjoy it!”
“Yes,” he said, bluntly, and kissed her before she could begin to protest, hard enough to make her head spin, before carrying on as if nothing major had happened. “I would. You are beautiful, and you are interesting, and I love your company both inside the bedroom and outside. To have you as companion for an indefinite amount of time is not something I’d turn up my nose at.”
“I . . .” She didn’t call him out on his assumption that she would want to be with him for an indefinite amount of time, as it was true that she would require someone to guide her in the life that came after. But that was supposing she accepted. “I can’t. It would be wrong.”
“More wrong than being forced out of the world before you have experienced more than a part of it?”
She was about to reply, but before she could, he vanished.
Then the street vanished, and the brown-grey walls of the attic ambled into her field of vision, looking at first scrambled and distorted, but becoming firmer and firmer as she fell back into herself. She didn’t know what was happening. Her only thought was that it must be something wrong, as she hadn’t willed herself out of the dream and he’d given no signs of being about to expel her, and—
“Heresy!” Rose came to, her ears filled with shouting so powerful it was no wonder the walls had been trembling before. She looked around blearily, not quite herself even though she had regained awareness. It only took her a moment to notice where the wax circle had been broken, attacked and excavated with a wooden pestle. Mrs. Cross finished throwing water on the burning herbs and turned to her, her watery blue eyes bloodshot. “Heresy and witchcraft under my roof, UNDER. MY. ROOF! What do you have to say for yourself?”
Rose had nothing to say for herself. She knew there would be no point in saying anything. She opened her hands and dropped the ring on the floorboards, where it dinged for a moment. Mrs. Cross’ head whipped down, noticing it, and inflated even more with portentous rage.
Rose thought that now, she might just know why she was going to die.
As far as Rose was concerned, the best decision she’d made that day was keeping her boots and coat on while she did the ritual. They were the only thing that made being thrown out slightly less unbearable, although it was also a relief that she hadn’t had holy water dumped on her — not for lack of desire to do so on Mrs. Cross’ part, incidentally, but because she had wasted the one she had drowning the devil-herbs.
It was snowing again.
Not hard, and it didn’t have the force of strong wind behind it, but she still had to keep her head down until she found a doorway wide enough to shelter her. She didn’t sit, because she would only freeze her behind on the stones. Instead, she leaned against the not-as-cold wood and swayed gently back and forth to keep her blood circulating.
More snow fell, covering the footsteps of the few who’d dared to come out during the day and turning the street into a winter wonderland. Rose wondered about what to do. The bakery had been her only home apart from the orphanage, and even if she felt capable of facing the shame, she was far too old to return to the latter.
She fleetingly thought about going down to the docks and asking for Millie, but it was likely that that ship had sailed, both literally and figuratively. She didn’t know anyone else who liked her enough to take her in. There was the killer, but she felt like his agreement on doing anything to help her would depend on whether she would let him turn her; a decision that even now, seemed as unthinkable as growing wings and flying.
She blew on her hands, mechanically, uselessly, as there wasn’t that much of a difference between her breath and the air in terms of heat. Even the largest clouds of fog she managed to produce were lackluster and unable to warm anything.
Giving up, she buried them inside her coat again and closed her eyes, meaning to do it only for a moment. However, before she knew it she was sagging towards the ground, and by then she didn’t feel like doing anything about it, even though the cost of staying motionless wasn’t lost on her.
Her senses left her not long after. Maybe it was better that way.
“Rose!” The killer’s voice was a welcome caress, even more so because he made no attempt to mask his concern. In her current predicament, being worried about was pleasantly unexpected. She couldn’t see him, or much of anything, really, but thought she was almost able to feel his touch, as she was growing warm. It could be that she’d simply gone past the edge of coldness and back, though. “Rose. Something odd is happening, I can sense it. What’s the matter?”
“I think,” she said, wondering if she was hallucinating him this time around, as not only was there hardly anything solid about this dream, her mind also kept throwing itself back into the doorway at the most inconvenient moments. “I think I’m dying.”
“Nonsense. You have more time left than this,” he snapped. Rose took his word for it. He would know everything about those matters, after all. “What happened?”
She explained as best she could. He didn’t take kindly to her explanation — growled at some parts of it, even — and again she felt a spark of satisfaction, this time at the fact that he was indignant on
her behalf.
“I see,” he said, once she was finished telling. His features were becoming clearer. It wasn’t the fragility of the dream distorting them anymore, but rage. She must have fallen deeper into sleep while she recounted the events for him, because a room was forming around them too. He stalked towards a window and looked out, shaking his head. “I’d like to come to you now — in person, this time — but alas, that isn’t possible. However, I believe I can ensure you survive—”
“Why?”
“Why?” He echoed her question back at her, not mocking, just disbelieving. “Do you wish to die?”
“You told me it would happen. Why not now? Why delay the inevitable?”
“I offered you a way to escape.”
“I know.” She didn’t want to cry, but it was too late to stop it from happening. Tears were rolling down her cheeks even in reality. It had been cruel of him, though she would never convince him to see it that way, to let her know the option was available, to make her strain herself to turn away from it. She didn’t want to die, and she didn’t want to kill, but eventually she would have to do at least one of the two. “I just have so many . . . so many doubts.”
“Then grant me the time to ease them.”
“I don’t . . .”
“Go to Stingray Lane. At the end you will find an abandoned house. Look under the sill of the second window from the right, ground level — it’s half-rotten, as I recall, so you should be able to reach in with ease — and you will find a key there. Take the key . . . are you listening still?”
“Yes.” To distract herself, and distract him from convincing her to join him in darkness.
“Good. After, head to the Fair Justice Inn. Ask for the room belonging to one Roger Eade. Show them the key and say you were instructed to wait there ‘til his arrival, in . . . let us say three days. I left some coin under the floorboards by the window, enough, I think, for you to feed yourself during that time.” He crossed his arms and turned to her. Everything about his demeanor was the epitome of seriousness already, but somehow his mouth managed to grow thinner when he faced her. “You are fading.”
The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set) Page 50